Back in 2005 — fifteen goddamn years ago — I was working an overnight shift at the TIME Magazine News Desk during an extraordinarily quiet evening, and decided to fill the downtime by composing a lark of a post on my still newly minted blog about an amusing-if-ridicuous theory postulated by pop-culture writer Chuck Klosterman. In a very silly nutshell, in an article from SPIN Magazine that was later appended to an anthology of his writings, Klosterman posited the not-entirely-serious notion that Kid A, Radiohead’s much ballyhooed fourth studio album from 2000, predicted the events of September 11, 2001. Should you care, you can read that post here.
That post ended up getting picked up and re-purposed by a couple of outlets, notably Cracked and Noisey, and then became fodder for a few Radiohead fan-sites and message boards.
Ever since that first post in 2005, no other entry I’ve put up here in the entirety of this blog’s lifespan has garnered as many clicks. It also accrued a wide swathe of comments, attracting both bug-eyed conspiracy theories and abusive spleen-venting from the Radiohead faithful. Just this morning, in fact, said post earned another quip, that being: "LMAOOO WHO LET THIS GUY HAVE INTERNET CONNECTION.”
Ah, mirth.
As I mentioned in 2016, I long stopped caring about this particular post. Like I said, it was never anything other than an amusing lark. Upon the album’s arrival in 2000, I believe I submitted a lukewarm review of it for a “teen-oriented” website called iStash that never launched (and never paid me), decrying the opus as a departure for nowhere. When I read Klosterman’s piece in SPIN some years later, this ludicrous-but-compelling re-interpretataion of the record gave me a new filter through which to listen, and it certainly did make me enjoy it more, trying to synch up the events in much the same manner in which people claim “The Wizard of Oz” meshes seamlessly with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I can’t imagine anyone still getting any mileage out of this idiocy, but then, I’m not an avid-enough Radiohead fan nor bona fide conspiracy theorist.
Here in 2020, I gave Kid A another full listen, this morning, during a 6AM walk. While certain tracks do retain a certain vibe for me — still tenuously tethered, in my mind, to Klosterman’s re-purposing — most of the record has lost the eerie mystique it used to retain. The first several tracks still intrigue, but I found my attention slipping during the latter half of the record. By the start of the final song, “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” I found myself opting out in favor of the band’s sophomore effort, The Bends, which has aged significantly better, to my mind.
In any case, in looking for a kicker for this post, I did some random googling, and up popped the video below, which was first posted on YouTube in 2011. I have no idea if it was inspired by Chuck Klosterman’s writing or my post on same.
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